On its last day as a working theater, in 1989, George Stein, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, wrote of the Mayan Theater that its history to that moment had been “a 61-year run of musicals, Depression-era WPA dramas, comedies, tango singers, Spanish films and X-rated movies.” Yet, the Times article, occasioned by the announcement of plans to refurbish the theater and reopen it as nightclub, omitted the outsized personalities linked to the Mayan — and to the Los Angeles oil boom, national scandal, and murder and suicide.
Welcome to another edition of our “Downtown Decoded: The Amazing History of our Beloved DTLA Theater District” series. This month we turn our attention to the Mayan Theater, which opened in 1927 and today operates primarily as a nightclub, concert venue and event venue, a purpose it has served since 1989.
A new theater for “musical comedies and extravaganzas”
The Mayan Theater, located at 1038 S. Hill Street, opened on August 15, 1927, next door to the Doheny Theater (later renamed the Belasco Theater). Both theaters were owned by oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny. According to a 1926 Los Angeles Times story announcing the awarding of contracts to build the Mayan, the two theaters would complement each other. The Doheny, opened in 1926, would present “smaller and highly artistic productions,” while those at the Mayan would be larger, splashier and include “musical comedies and extravaganzas.” The contract to design the Mayan went to the architecture firm Morgan, Walls & Clement in a competition held by Doheny.
The firm was assisted in its design for the Mayan Theater by Mexican anthropologist and sculptor Francisco Cornejo. And although the theater is the “Mayan,” the architects used designs from various Pre-Columbian civilizations in their plan, according to the Times.
Prominent original features of the theater include the bas relief figures of the Mayan war and sun god Huitzilopochtli over the seven cathedral-style windows on the exterior façade and the three-tiered chandelier inside the theater, a replica of an Aztec calendar stone buried in Mexico City during the Spanish conquest and rediscovered in the 18th century. According to the Times, the Morgan, Walls & Clement design for the Mayan would become “the best exemplar of a Mayan Revival theater in the country.”
Yet, even before Edward Doheny built and opened the Mayan Theater and his namesake Doheny Theater, his notoriety had grown due to his role in a national scandal that would contribute to the end of a presidency and the death of his son under mysterious circumstances.
Edward L. Doheny, Teapot Dome and two shocking society deaths
By the early 1920s, Doheny was the richest man in Los Angeles. In 1892, he had discovered oil near the La Brea Tar Pits, a discovery that drove a boom period in the region. In the early 1900s, he turned to oil exploration and production in Mexico, where he would make much of his wealth. But in 1921, Doheny would allegedly attempt to grow that wealth and extend his empire by bribing federal officials for oil leases.
In his history of Los Angeles, A Bright and Guilty Place, Richard Rayner wrote that Doheny sent his son, Edward L. “Ned” Doheny Jr., and Ned's chauffeur, Hugh Plunkett, “to Washington, where they handed $100,000 in a black leather satchel to Interior Secretary Albert Fall. In exchange Doheny got the lease on a naval oil reserve, worth some $100 million.” The bribe and secret lease would come out as part of the Teapot Dome scandal and trials, named for the oil reserve near Casper, Wyoming, secretly leased to oil tycoon Harry F. Sinclair after his alleged bribes to Fall. Doheny and Sinclair were acquitted, but Fall was convicted and became the first cabinet official to serve time for crimes committed while in office.
According to Britannica, the Teapot Dome scandal revealed that the administration of then-President Warren G. Harding “was rife with corruption.” And although Harding was not personally implicated in the scandal, “the stress related to it took a toll on his health, and he died in office” in 1923. Yet, investigations continued for years, putting pressure on the Doheny family and leading to what the Times called “the sensational society killings that rocked L.A.”
In 1929, Plunkett, the driver, was due to testify. But on February 16, he and Ned Doheny were both found dead of bullet wounds at the latter’s home, Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, today a public park and event space on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. After a quick investigation, the Times reported in 2019, “authorities ruled that a deranged Plunkett had shot his employer and then turned the gun on himself. But to this day the crime is a source of rumor and speculation.” Upon the elder Doheny’s death in 1935, and at his direction, his widow, Carrie Estelle Doheny, burned most of his papers, his posthumous effort to remove the stain of Teapot Dome from the family name, according to historian Martin R. Ansell.
A changing theater for a changing Los Angeles
In the post-Doheny era, the Mayan Theater went through a number of changes as a venue for live entertainment and film before becoming the nightclub it is today.
During the Great Depression, the theater was rented to the federal Works Projects Administration, the Times’s Stein wrote. The WPA, which employed largely unskilled job seekers to work on public works projects, also provided work to artists of various kinds. It operated the Mayan as an Actors Workshop theater.
From the late 1940s to the late 1960s, the Mayan served as a venue for Spanish-language entertainment. Acquired by the Fouce family in 1947, Stein wrote, the theater provided “a steady diet of Spanish-language films, leavened occasionally with stage shows, comics and singers.”
In 1969, the Mayan began its life as an adult-movie theater, under the ownership of adult-film director and actor Carlos Tobalina. One of his changes to the theater was to replace the dull tan and orange of the exterior façade with a vivid mix of colors. It was a more authentic appearance for the Pre-Columbian motif, the then-vice president of the Los Angeles Historic Theatre Foundation told the Times. It is an appearance the theater maintains to this day.
As early as 1969, Tobalina and his films were the targets of prosecutions under obscenity laws in various jurisdictions. About a year before the theater closed in 1989, entrepreneurs had approached Tobalina and preservationists with the nightclub idea. Tobalina, along with his wife, approved the makeover. But he would not live to see the Mayan as a nightclub. On March 31, 1989, Tobalina was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Pacific Palisades.
Almost from its opening day, the Mayan has appeared in several movies and television productions. Film appearances include “It Couldn’t Have Happened — But It Did” (1936), “Save the Tiger” (1973), “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” (1979), “The Bodyguard” (1992), and “A Night at the Roxbury” (1998). On television, the Mayan appeared in a 2003 episode of “Alias” and in an episode of the Netflix series “GLOW,” among others.
The Mayan Theater today
Today, the Mayan Theater serves as a popular nightclub, with a capacity of 1,500 people. It is recognized as a Historic-Cultural Monument by the City of Los Angeles. As a concert venue, it has hosted major acts, including Charli XCX, Daft Punk, Jack White and Rosalía. It hosts other popular events, such as Lucha VaVOOM, which combines Mexican lucha libre wrestling, burlesque performances and comedic commentary and skits—with the occasional assist from comedians such as Drew Carey and Andy Richter.
When plans were announced in 1989 for the theater’s conversion from adult-film theater to nightclub, the then-executive director of the Los Angeles Conservancy called it “a positive step” and an opportunity for more people to enjoy the Mayan’s architecture. Today, the live entertainment that features at the theater and draws so many people night after night hearkens back to the Mayan’s earliest incarnation, as a venue for “musical comedies and extravaganzas.”
Want to be part of the movement to bring your DTLA theater district back to life? Check out our master plans to learn about how you can help restore DTLA to a vibrant district, uplifting theater and invigorating our local economy by 2028!